linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH] Revert "cfg80211: make WEXT compatibility unselectable"

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Message-ID: <20141231214421.GA29273@thunk.org>
Date:	Wed, 31 Dec 2014 16:44:21 -0500
From:	Theodore Ts'o <tytso@....edu>
To:	Arend van Spriel <arend@...adcom.com>
Cc:	Jiri Kosina <jkosina@...e.cz>,
	"Grumbach, Emmanuel" <emmanuel.grumbach@...el.com>,
	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Borislav Petkov <bp@...en8.de>,
	"linux-wireless@...r.kernel.org" <linux-wireless@...r.kernel.org>,
	"linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	"egrumbach@...il.com" <egrumbach@...il.com>,
	"peter@...leysoftware.com" <peter@...leysoftware.com>,
	"ilw@...ux.intel.com" <ilw@...ux.intel.com>,
	"Berg, Johannes" <johannes.berg@...el.com>,
	Larry Finger <Larry.Finger@...inger.net>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] Revert "cfg80211: make WEXT compatibility unselectable"

On Wed, Dec 31, 2014 at 09:32:13PM +0100, Arend van Spriel wrote:
> 
> Agree. I can't even recall using "ip" ever. iw help system does provide
> command specific help. The phy keyword is both a command and a selector key,
> which I realize is confusing to the user, eg. 'iw help info' does provide
> help for the 'info' subcommand.

Yeah, the confusing part is that "ip" tends to use "verb object"
scheme, which is consistent with the Cisco IOS command set it was
trying to emulate.   So for ip, you do something like

ip link info eth0

Where as for "iw" it's almost exactly backwards, i.e.:

iw wlan0 info

It's actually rather unfortunate that there is no consistency between
many of these tools, for example:

ethtool --show-features eth0

If we were going to create a new interface, wouldn't be nice if we
could have some kind of consistency?  Sigh; oh well, water under the
bridge at this point.

> Thanks. If there are still drivers, upstream or out-of-tree, providing only
> WEXT API this will not work unless iwconfig/iwlist can distinguish those
> from cfg80211-based drivers (which is possible) and fallback to WEXT ioctl
> syscalls. Just not sure if it is worth the effort. As you stated below, it
> does not seem "evil" to retain WEXT if that is providing users what they
> need.

Is it really that much effort?  Unless there is some license
incompatibility nonsense (i.e., GPLv2 vs GPLv3), the code's already
there in the wireless-tools source.  It would just be a matter of
trying the new ioctls first, and then falling back to the WEXT ones if
needed, right?

Cheers,

					- Ted
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